In this week’s lecture, we had a guest lecturer named Ramon, who is a researcher at RMIT and who is also filled with knowledge about film and television, two things I love to spend a lot of my time on. In the lecture we focused on television, streaming, and audience fragmentation.

He first began by giving us some statistics, which I consider fun facts as they were very interesting to find out.

tv in australia by number:

Hours of broadcast TV viewing by numbers = 2.7
Hours of online viewing per day = 0.5 (I was surprised by this because from the amount of online viewing my friends and I do per day would probably we at leasttttttt tripled, although I suck at estimating.).
Devices per household = 6.4
Household subscribing to Netflix = 25%

Ramon then explained the progress of TV throughout the years, discussing the development of channels.

In 1977… there was only broadcast TV, which had 4 channels.
In 1997… broadcast TV had risen to 5 channels, although pay TV had been introduced by then and had 20 channels.
In 2017… broadcast TV has multiplied by six and now has 30 channels, while pay TV has a whopping 150+.

It was interesting to discover the different types of Online TV, which include:

  • Catch-up
  • SVOD (subscription video on demand)
  • IVOD (interactive video on demand), and
  • AVOD (advertising, or ad based, video on demand, free to consumers such as Youtube, Facebook etc).
what does this mean for the audience?

Ramon began to explain that now users are in charge, and celebrate their newfound ability to control their media environment.

There is a fear, however, that digital media is eroding common cultural forms of mass media, promoting social polarisation.

Netflix!

 

Some statistics/facts:

  • World’s largest SVOD service.
  • 125,000,000 hours of viewing per day
  • Operates in 190+ countries
  • 100 million subscribers globally
  • Headquarters in California.
  • In some countries, Netflix is very unsuccessfully as not all countries want it’s American content.
  • Europe are demanding a certain percentage of European content/
  • Netflix is blocked in Indonesia.